The Grand Prize Winner of last month’s Trivia Challenge Quiz is D. Gonzalez of Geneva! He was the first person to correctly answer my quiz question from last month: To ring in the New Year in Spain, it is traditional to do what on each chime of the clock?

A study of computer programmers at Bell Laboratories showed that the star performers outperformed moderate performers by a margin of 8 to 1. If that holds true in your organization, the conversion of five of your moderate performers into star performers would be the equivalent of adding 35 moderate performers to your workforce. Where are you going to find the five additional star performers? You don’t find them. You develop them.

They are everywhere these days. WiFi hotspots for checking e-mail and hopping on the Internet can be found in airports, coffee shops and even most fast-food joints. But have you ever wondered, just how safe is it to connect? With the proliferation of hackers, viruses and identity theft at an all-time high, you are smart to be concerned. Unfortunately, it is easy for a hacker to set up a WiFi spot to access your laptop, called an “evil twin.”

While many people buy their significant other a box of decadent chocolates, a dozen red roses or an oversize teddy bear for Valentine’s Day, there are a few people who are going to go home with a broken heart as their personal information is stolen right from under them. It’s a harsh reality, but both individuals and businesses are constantly targeted by fraudsters and hackers who want to steal any bit of data that will make them money.

Virtualization Brings New Levels of Efficiency to Chicago Businesses
New strides in information technology have allowed businesses to reduce their technological overhead while significantly improving the number of operations they can perform each day.

Information is the most important aspect of any business, which means it’s extremely important to keep it as safe as possible. In order to protect your data, you need to have a disaster recovery and backup plan in place, which will help prevent you from losing important items, such as customer contact information and accounting records.

Whether you’re starting a new business or have a long-standing company that is knee-deep in networking, it’s a good idea to look into the possibility of professional IT consulting services. If you’re not familiar with what IT consulting is, it’s basically a service that works with businesses, or even individuals, in managing their networks, blogs, web presence or other online avenues.

Many businesses invested in a broadband connection years ago. Yours may even have proper T-1 connection.

The problem is that these connections are insufficient for many businesses. There's simply just not enough bandwidth available with these older types of connections to support VoIP, video conferencing, email, web browsing, financial transactions and the myriad of other data-intensive operations that most businesses conduct.